FOCUS is the unifying format for cloud bills
making it easier to derive greater value from cloud spend
SAN
DIEGO, June 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The FinOps
Foundation, a part of The Linux Foundation's non-profit technology
consortium focused on advancing the people and practice of FinOps,
today announced the General Availability (GA) of the FinOps Open
Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) Version 1.0. By creating a
uniform format for cloud bills across different cloud providers,
FOCUS reduces complexity for FinOps practitioners and eases
adoption of cloud infrastructure and software.
All of the leading cloud providers, including Google Cloud,
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), and Oracle Cloud,
have all formally contributed to the development of Version 1.0.
FOCUS boasts a Steering Committee with voting members from leading
cloud providers as well as practitioners from some of the largest
and most advanced cloud users in the world.
Today, the specification's 1.0 release is ready for general
adoption having passed through a rigorous approval and IP review
process. In the coming months, the Foundation expects to see
improving data exports from billing generators such as the clouds,
platforms, private cloud, and SaaS providers.
"We are committed to working with the FinOps Foundation to bring
together the knowledge and involvement of all major players in
cloud billing to benefit all," said Fred
Delombaerde, Vice President of Commerce Platform &
Marketplace at Microsoft.
"Google has more than 20 years of consuming, creating, and
contributing to open source projects, it is a key part of our DNA.
The FOCUS open billing data project naturally extends our
commitment towards being the most open cloud provider. We want our
customers to easily understand their cloud costs so that they spend
more time innovating and creating business value — and we believe
with FOCUS we are taking steps towards this reality," said
Pravir Gupta, Vice President of
Google Cloud.
"We are excited to be part of an effort to make it easier for
customers to use cloud financial data to get a better understanding
of their AWS investments. Contributing to the FOCUS specification
is an important part of our broader efforts to improve our cloud
financial management offerings and help customers get the most out
of their AWS investments," said James
Greenfield, Vice President, Commerce Platform at AWS.
While this is an early major milestone in the FOCUS journey, the
specification is just getting started. As the Use Case Library
expands, FOCUS contributors, maintainers and steering committee
members are already working on the 1.1 release and planning for the
1.2 release. The depth and quality of the spec will increase over
time and the project expects to see billing generators (e.g. the
clouds) increase the quality of their FOCUS outputs. As adoption
grows, more vendors plan to support FOCUS data ingestion and
reporting, adopt FOCUS terminology in their platforms, and align
billing data outputs to the requirements in the specification.
Version 1.0 includes common taxonomy, terminology, and metrics
for billing datasets produced by cloud infrastructure as a service
(IaaS) providers. FOCUS will be extensible to other cloud
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) billing datasets, including
networking, observability, and security tools. Future updates are
expected to add further support for SaaS providers and on-premises
datasets.
"Adopting FOCUS now immediately gives cloud consumers the
benefit of normalized cloud spend, plus starts them on a journey
with the specification that will allow them to easily add future
types of spending as iterative releases improve it. It solves for
today's use cases, but it also sets you up for tomorrow's
opportunities," said Mike Fuller,
CTO at the FinOps Foundation. "We've moved beyond the initial
building phase for FOCUS and into the phase where practitioners can
use these datasets to perform multi-cloud discount analysis,
optimize resource usage, and allocate shared costs. FOCUS makes it
easier for organizations to increase value from their cloud
investments."
To help realize business value, FinOps practitioners worked with
the FinOps Foundation to build a library of over forty common
FinOps use cases, each complete with an SQL query that leverages
FOCUS columns to answer critical business questions. These use
cases offer a standardized approach to extracting answers from
billing data and give practitioners time back to work on higher
priority FinOps capabilities.
"At GitLab, we are seeing value in using the FinOps Open Cost
and Usage Specification to create a single source of truth for
cloud billing and usage to gain insights faster and make more
informed decisions with data," said Clément Leroux, Cloud FinOps
Engineer at GitLab. "We look forward to more organizations adopting
the Specification."
To get to this simple set of columns that makes FOCUS so
impactful, thousands of hours of discussion and reviews occurred in
an operational structure that allows community inputs, and contains
a set of IP protections processes to protect adopters from patent
infringement concerns. Getting to consensus on a specification
takes time, and deep discussion with product experts from the
entire environment of cloud. Some conversations around simple
labels and column descriptions are the culminations of hundreds of
hours of conversations with dozens of contributors.
"The general availability of the FOCUS 1.0 specification
represents not only a pivotal step in IT cost management but also a
huge step forward in supporting multicloud strategies in billing
disintermediation from any specific vendor environment. This is a
BIG deal. All organizations of any size and at any point in their
cloud journey and across all industries will benefit immensely.
FOCUS 1.0 is the first step in a long journey towards the
abstractable, composable cloud. It removes the burden of the
multi-skill set knowledge required to manage costs across all of
the tools and clouds organizations use to manage and support their
IT environment. In doing so, organizations can more easily optimize
their cloud investments and drive sustainable financial growth,"
said Tracy Woo, Forrester Principal
Analyst.
For more information about the FOCUS Project and 1.0 release,
please visit FinOps Foundation Insights.
About The FinOps Foundation
The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit trade association focused on
advancing the people who manage the value of cloud. It is made up
of tens of thousands of FinOps practitioners, service providers and
cloud technology providers including those in 48 of the Fortune 50.
Grounded in real-world stories, the FinOps Foundation delivers
connections to peers, certification, and open source best practices
through programs like FinOps Certified Practitioner, the annual
FinOps X conference, a FinOps Certified Enterprise program, and
FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification).
Media Contact
pr@linuxfoundation.org
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